Still Life with a Glass and Oysters

Jan Davidsz de Heem

Oil on wood panel

Metropolitan Museum of Art

A spiraling lemon peel drapes over a towering roemer glass in this exquisite Dutch still life, its coiled form catching light beside plump grapes, glistening oysters, and a rumpled swag of green velvet. De Heem, the preeminent still-life painter of the Dutch Golden Age, renders every surface with astonishing tactile precision, from the briny sheen of the oyster shell to the dewy bloom on each grape. Beyond its sensory richness, the painting carries the era's taste for vanitas symbolism, luxury foods and fragile glass hinting at the fleeting nature of pleasure and life itself. This is a work that rewards slow, close looking, revealing new jewel-like details each time the eye returns to it.